Author Archives: bonniedonily

About Snow, Sort Of

Posted on by
(Tim, Sam, Gil and Simon – the stars of today’s story – 22-plus years ago.)

[For your reading pleasure today, another Throwback. Or…should I say SNOWback? Oh, my sides. Enjoy, in spite of bad puns.]

They say that in the Inuit language, there are about fifty different words that can be translated into one English word: snow. Those conversing about snow in that language are able to understand perfectly what kind of white stuff is being referred to since the description is inherent in the word.

We are not so fortunate in the English economy of words. Snow, other than the original meaning, can also refer to the fuzzy reception on your television (talk about a throwback) or in alternate verb form, to trick someone. All this can be very confusing to a small person. Hanging out with my small children, I can hear a lot of funny interpretations as they attempt to translate the adult language around them.

Kids are literalists. On the morning of the first frost, Gil was calling his little brothers’ attention to the crystallized scene out our window. When he referred to it as frost (there’s probably a really appropriate word for it in Inuit), Tim’s eyes got very big and said, “That’s a pretty big cake out there!” Although he’s old enough to know that the frosting outside isn’t sweet – not that Timmy wouldn’t test the theory – he got the connection immediately. In another “chilly” scenario, while picking some sticky burrs off Simon’s sweatpants the other day, I asked a little friend of his if he ever had burrs. To which he replied, “I only get “brrrs” when I eat ice cream.”

My two older boys have sibling rivalry down pat. They are constantly scrapping about…well, everything. So when Tim went off to spend the day with Dad last week, I had a relatively peaceful day with the other two. Later that evening, when I called Gil’s attention to the fact that there were no fights that day, I inadvertently told him that he and Tim were “the problem”. He took it upon himself to explain this to Tim as they lay in bed that night. Using the best analogy he could come up with, we overheard him say to Tim, “It’s like the world is a big math book and we’re the problem!”

As if single words weren’t enough, kids have to decipher phrases as well. My nephew Sam is the star of a favorite family story. One day, as his mom was bent over cutting his fingernails, he decided to investigate something that his mom had repeatedly told him. Reaching into her hair, he prodded her head, then said, “Oops, sorry, Mom. I poked you in the eye.” Puzzled, she denied that his fingers had gone anywhere near her eyes. To which he replied, “I meant the ones in the back of your head.”

Be careful what you say to your children. They might take you literally and poke you in the eye – oops – I mean the head.

About Minimalism

Posted on by

I watched the Netflix show The Minimalists: Less is Now this last week. Minimalism is pretty hot these days which is interesting since the recycling of Amazon cardboard boxes is also trending. Minimalists like Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus of theminimalists.com or Joshua Becker of becomingminimalist.com tout that they have all had the experience of ditching most of their accumulated “stuff” and then reaping that inverse proportion – maybe even more – of happiness, contentment and meaning.

Hmm, sounds familiar, sort of: “Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.” Oh yeah, that was Jesus, one of the original minimalists. Well, okay then.

I actually love this message which is why I continue to watch such Netflix shows about minimalism and purging (the good kind, a la Marie Kondo). On the flip side, I enjoyed an unhealthy fascination with hoarding shows when they first became popular, but mostly for the after pictures that are shown in the last five minutes of the show. I love me a good makeover, especially if it’s just about scaling down the room or the hair or the makeup so you can see the real foundation of what is actually there, which is probably pretty darn good.

Ah, but there’s the mystery. Who are you really underneath it all? And what do you really want your rooms to look like? Along with digging through stacks of newspapers and storage bins, the proponents of minimalism say you have face up to who you are and where you want to be – both figuratively and literally. For some, it may result in selling it all and moving into a motorhome to go find the answer.

Again, Jesus: “If you want to be complete, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” This is where the heebie-jeebies set in: sell ALL my possessions? THEN I can follow Jesus? Or find zen? Or 42, The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything?

Well, no. But yes. If what is keeping you from happy is stuff, then logic follows that the stuff needs to go. Of course, physically getting rid of the excess is the “easiest” way to free yourself. But there is also a metaphysical component to freeing yourself. Sometimes it means getting in a car and going on a road-trip with a suitcase full of comfy clothes and hiking shoes to find out what it is that you really miss. (Chances are it’s people.) (But not dusting or looking for your keys.) (And maybe it’s the road.)

I’ve had my own aha-moments with minimalism, first precipitated by so many moves. Pack outdated university textbooks and boxes of old magazines more than once and you soon realize that you need to SCALE IT DOWN – or suffer a hernia. And then there was the time we got ourselves in a bind mortgage-wise and downsized from an acreage to a teeny-tiny bungalow. When we stood the couches on end just to get them into our new house, we pretty quickly realized that a bunch of it had to go. Fast. Before a falling couch wrecked one of our kids.

But those were good lessons because we found out two things: One, we didn’t need a lot of that stuff. And Two, we didn’t even like a lot of that stuff. The binary choice of this couch or that one made it easy to see what we liked because we couldn’t have it all. And sometimes it resulted in deciding we like neither couch and that we needed to save up to buy a new one that suited us better. And the surprise of all surprises, for both Rick and I was that while we still valued a few Things, we found out we really valued Space. Which really is Nothing. Talk about minimalism!

I’m not getting rid of everything, because frankly, it hurts for me to sit cross-legged on the floor all the time. But I keep working at having LESS because LESS is MORE. At least in my books. And in the minimalists’. And Jesus’. So there.

About Routine

Posted on by

It’s weird, you know. After Christmas is done, after all the extra tasks I’ve given myself of shopping and card-writing and wrapping and cooking and cleaning and celebrating, by the time January 2 rolls around, I’m looking longingly to the return of my mundane routine.

I’ve worked primarily from home for a long time and have been able to “set my own hours” while I homeschooled my boys and managed my home and work responsibilities. For years, I sort of flouted a set routine, I’m sorry to say (or am I?) When my kids were young, we sort of flew by the seat of our pants: we got our schoolwork done (somehow) but we didn’t always start at the same time of day and sometimes we spontaneously took a day (or two or three) off. As the boys got older and busier, it felt like the calendar dictated my days and weeks as I ferried them to music lessons and youth group and theater and part-time jobs. And because I still had to make sure we were all fed and the house was cleaned and my work-work was done, it was a pretty busy season of life.

As an empty nester, you would think that there’s plenty of time to get all that I want to get done in a day. But for some reason, it doesn’t work that way. If I let time go unbridled, I can easily get sucked down an Instagram or Internet or Organizing vortex and then NOTHING gets done – because really, I’m kind of a minimalist and the house doesn’t need to be organized, again.

Schedule, schedule, schedule! That is what gets me down to the basement to work out regularly or out the door to walk, it’s what gets my butt in the chair to write and what keeps me from falling into those vortices. And because I have #goals when it comes to writing, I have learned this last year or so to give myself small assignments every day. Have I always been good at following through? Noooooooo. But I keep trying and refining and failing and getting back up again.

Because no one else is telling me what to do, I have to tell myself. Everyday I write down three things I want to work on. The first one is the most important and the thing I really need to do that day. The second thing is the thing I do when I’ve completed enough of the first task or finished it completely and I need to switch tasks – after a break and a coffee and maybe a small amount of time in the Instagram Vortex. The third thing I may not even get to that day – but that’s okay because it’s not as important as the first and second thing and at least I worked on those and the whole day wasn’t lost. And sometimes it helps to write down the three things the day or night before so that I don’t have a brain lapse when I look at an empty day and think I don’t have anything to do that day.

For the most part, I have a routine: I get up, read, drink some coffee, exercise, drink some more coffee, etc. But then it’s time to get to my three tasks. All the other stuff – laundry and lunch, errands and extras – that gets fit into the spaces in between of what I’ve decided are the most important things to do that day. And yes, sometimes lunch or laundry is the most important thing if a friend is coming over (that used to happen, right?) or we just got back from holiday (that used to happen, too.)

Is it boring? Well, yes, maybe it looks that way on the outside. But if the outcome is between finishing a writing project or finishing Netflix, Future Bonnie is gonna be happier if she finishes the writing project. And if I get to my writing chair on time everyday, there still is plenty of time for Netflix.

About 100 Dreams

Posted on by
Photo by Benjamin Sow on Unsplash

I am a big believer in writing things down and a lover of lists of all sorts. So when I came across an idea from author Laura Vanderkam last year, I knew I wanted to try complete it: a List of 100 Dreams. Well, not complete it in the sense of get everything on the list “done”, but first just try to actually write down 100 Dreams.

I’m not talking about the visions – or nightmares – that visit you at night. This list is about writing down all the things you want to do, places you want to go, people you want to meet – no holds barred. And like a lot of things, it’s easier said than done.

I first heard about the idea from Vanderkam on her podcast Before Breakfast – she’s known for time management and working from home – two things that were especially hot in the work world after March last year. And she likes to address not just the working side of a person, but the other rest-of-life person, too. All work and no play makes for an unhappy person all round.

And so, The List of 100 Dreams.

The first thing I did was cue up a world map on Google and I systematically wrote down all the places I would love to go: Italy, France, Ireland, Poland, Hogwarts, the Shire. Remember, this was before regular people (a.k.a. not Alberta MLAs) had to shut down all travel plans. But it was a list of dreams and therefore perfectly okay to write down even the most frivolous desires of the heart.

On the one hand, I dream about travelling. On the other, my dreams are things that can be accomplished for the most part at my desk at home: write a memoir, write a novel, learn Greek and Latin, read all the books. I haven’t finished my list yet – there’s a lot of things in between going and staying – and I plan on writing a full 100 in my new 2021 planner. But even though the list’s title gives me permission to dream with abandon, I still find it hard to Dream Big.

It all comes with getting older, I think, and more…realistic? After all, I’m over 53 now. It’s not exactly Over the Proverbial Hill, but let’s just say, my age precludes any Olympic aspirations yet unmet. Reasonably: I don’t have that kind of time. Or, that kind of bod.

But that very reasonableness – or wisdom – is actually a gift. When we’re babies, we can dream all kinds of things: become the first woman to live on Mars, finish Netflix, read the Wikipedia, become a hermit, become famous. But getting older, we are able to filter out the things that are just Frankly a Waste of Your Time to Dream. For you. Because everyone gets to decide what dreams they want to cherish and what dreams are just downright Cuckoo-For-Cocoa-Puffs. For them.

The other gift of getting older? An awareness of your own mortality. Not in a morbid kind of way, but more in a way to galvanize your sorting: this thing matters, this thing doesn’t. And there’s nothing like your impending death to make you sit up and say, “Wait! I just need to get this one thing done first!”

You get to decide what to dream and to express what dreams still lie in your heart that you never did decide on – they were always just there. It is never to late to Just Dream.

About 2020

Posted on by
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/edmonton-ad-agency-sums-up-2020-with-xmas-dumpster-fire-channel-1.5224958

This year, on Christmas Eve, instead of tuning in our television screen to the standard fireplace channel to set the mood for a magical evening, we opted for a dumpster fire that we queued up on YouTube which had been produced by an Edmonton graphic design firm.

And so we come to the end of The Year That Nobody Expected, Not In A Million Years. Let’s see: there was a world-wide pandemic, premature death, economic chaos and, ugh, social distancing. You mean to say that throughout this sh*tstorm, we don’t even get to cry on other people’s shoulders, pull them in close for a hug or sit side-by-side just to have the feeling that someone else is with you? Isn’t that what shoulders are for? So, yes, the appropriate response might be to throw it all into the dumpster and, for good measure, douse it in gasoline and light it up.

Is it possible that there’s another response?

Easy for me to say. Yes, there have been difficult moments for me this year. There was uncertainty, there was frustration, there was fatigue with the whole dang situation – and that all continues as we move into a new year. But I/we have been “lucky”: our business has survived and none of my immediate family got “The Vid”. (Although Simon claims he can still feel the swab they stuck up his nose to test him back in May.)

The last few months of 2020 I’ve been reading through Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World about different ways to practice faith…well, practically. The last chapter is about pronouncing blessings, which is something that anyone can do. BBT says she’s not even sure you have to believe in God to pronounce something blessed, that “it may be enough to see the thing for what it is and pronounce it good.”

AND THEN she goes on to say that you blessing something doesn’t confer the holiness – it already is just there – that maybe we have no business deciding if something is a blessing or not. One can say a blessing “when you break a bone the same as you do when you win the lottery. The two events may be more alike than you know.“

Hmm.

I remember the first time I was challenged with this concept. It was while I was attending university and had stopped in to visit my spiritual mentor at the time. I overstayed my parking welcome and when I found a (not-a-lottery) ticket on my windshield, he called out from the front door where he and his wife were waving goodbye to me: “Call it a blessing!”

Okaaaaay…how could I do that? Well, first of all, it wasn’t enough to erase the happy feeling I had of the good, long visit we had just enjoyed. I got a ticket, but I was also lucky enough to own my own car. I got a ticket but I probably didn’t starve to pay it. I got a ticket and it taught me to be more careful next time. Apparently, there were myriad blessings in the thing.

The dumpster fire can consume a lot of crap. But it can give off a lot of warmth and light, too, which is Not All Bad. Wishing you a Happy New Year and pronouncing it Already Blessed, No Matter What.

About Me and Santa, Again

Posted on by

Thursday, December 24, 2020, 6:04 a.m.

From: bonnie@bonniedonily.com

To: santa@northpole.ca

Santa!

I really meant to get this message off to you sooner, but since Canada Post is up to their earballs with round-the-clock deliveries in this package-laden-pandemic-pandemonium, I thought I’d shoot you an email instead. Feel feel to wait until Boxing Day to open it. I know you must be busy right now.

Or are you? I mean, Covid has really changed the definition of “busy” for a lot of people. Things certainly don’t look anywhere near the same as they did when I wrote you last year. Well, my tree is up and the presents are wrapped and the perogies are tucked into the freezer with care in hopes that my children soon will be here. But, riddle me this Santa? When exactly is that going to be? When will we be all together, under one roof, free to hug with abandon, again?

As much as Amazon and Etsy are getting all the love this year, I think a lot of us aren’t really wishing for material things as much as we are wishing that our loved ones would materialize in front of us. How crazy that we took that in stride last year, the gift of presence. If Covid has gifted me anything, it’s the realization that I actually like people and I wouldn’t mind hanging around them more, without the worry they they are contagious. It’s just too dystopian for me, all the masks and the not-touching and the Zooming.

I don’t want to mix you up with God, asking you for things that I know it’s more in His Department for me to ask for – namely for the end to this pandemic and for things to be “normal” again by next Christmas. And far be it from me to threaten your job security – there certainly is enough of that going around – but I don’t think I need much right now.

BUT, just in case, I will let you know that I still haven’t stopped thinking about that set of toy pots and pans with the happy faces on them that I wished for so badly when I was a 6-year-old paging through the Sears catalog. I’m thinking you must have had shares in that company – at least the Christmas catalog part? Glad you’re still around even if Sears isn’t.

Merry Christmas, Santa. Make sure you have lots of hand sanitizer and extra masks with you as you make your rounds tonight. And above all, stay safe. We want to see you again next Christmas.

XO (the only kind that are ok right now),

Bonnie

About Tradition

Posted on by

It sort of goes without saying that this will be a different kind of Christmas.

“Normally” what we do every year is pretty much the same. Christmas Day is at Rick’s parents’ house, New Year’s Eve and Day is at our house, in between we get together with my siblings and their families. Plus there are three birthdays in between Christmas and New Year’s, one of which is celebrated with Chinese food, a nice change from the turkey and chocolate overload. It can be pretty busy and leaves me sometimes wishing for just a little bit of time to work on a dang jigsaw puzzle and watch some Mr. Bean.

Sometimes you HAVE to be careful what you wish for.

The temptation this year might be to treat Christmas Day like just any old day. Because if we can’t have Christmas the way we want, if it’s not going to be the way Christmas “normally” is, well then: forget it. Maybe I’ll just open up a bag of turkey-and-mashed-potato-flavored potato chips and scroll through “The Best/Worst 2020 Pandemic Memes” on Buzzfeed.

Nope, not gonna do it. I am determined to keep Christmas in my heart like Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge vows in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

And anyways, is there really such a thing as a “normal” Christmas? Things just keep changing from one year to the next. Fake Christmas trees get more real looking than real ones. Abnormal frosts wipe out entire mandarin orange crops. A freak storm on Christmas Eve leaves somebody stranded in a motel in Vegreville. Someone usually has the flu, or everyone, like last year in our family.

One year, after saying goodbye to our mother ten days before Christmas, we all retreated to our respective corners and agreed to celebrate Christmas together in January. One year, we watched Rick’s parents’ shop burn down on Christmas Eve, our spirits dampening as the firemen extinguished the flames. One year, we spent too much time in the hospital and Christmas really didn’t feel that merry.

Some years we coupled the joy of a new baby with the fatigue to barely enjoy Christmas. Years later, we welcomed those babies’ girlfriends as happy new additions to the crowded table.

Oh sure, we usually eat the same things (unless there is a mandarin orange shortage) and play games and open presents, as usual. But one of the traditions of Christmas is to take the time to notice the changes and the speed of life and hold your breath for a moment, before the moment of Christmas passes.

As Scrooge said to his nephew before his fated ghostly visits, “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine!” It really is up to you how you will keep your Christmas this year, but don’t forget to watch. It won’t be the same next year.

About The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Posted on by

Christmas pageants and plays, populated with preschoolers and preteens, have perennially caused problems for pastors and play-directors. Well, maybe we can be a little more generous and just call them “memorable experiences”.

Unfortunately, this year, a.k.a. The Year That Covid Killed Christmas, there won’t be any opportunities to watch your kids have a live meltdown on stage at school or at church or at a recital or ANYWHERE. Thankfully, we still have plenty of ways to recreate moments like your preschool daughter flashing her underpants (repeatedly) at the entire church congregation (because fancy skirts can be so much fun to flip up and down). Or like when your usually sunny son stands front and center on stage with his arms crossed, scowling at the crowd and refusing to sing in spite of every other rehearsal going as smoothly as possible.

Remember Kevin McAllister’s rotten brother Buzz? He expertly (and blatantly) antagonizes his little brother during an angelic solo and then absolves himself of all of the blame after the entire show’s scenery comes crashing down around Kevin’s lit-up ears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7-T-pqCCs

And there was story I reviewed last Christmas on this blog, The Shepherd, The Angel and Walter the Christmas Dog, where (spoiler alert) the entire choir loft ceiling came crashing down. There’s just too many variables in a live performance with unpaid and underage amateurs amid poorly anchored scenery for Christmas plays to go exactly as planned.

[Side note: When I was a youngster, I went with my mom to a Christmas concert at Derwent School and watched while my big brother was “operated on” with a carpenter’s saw behind a backlit curtain after a scene where he ate too much pie. I bawled my eyes out thinking that something had gone horribly amiss. But no, the play went exactly as planned and it did look like they killed him. And that’s why you shouldn’t eat too much pie at Christmas, especially if someone wants to try out some new tools.]

The title of Barbara Robinson’s classic book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever appears, at first blush, to be ironic. The Herdman kids, notorious for wrecking everything in their path, bully their way into all the lead parts for the church’s nativity play which were (in this story) traditionally held by the milder and meek of the Sunday School crowd. The initial attraction for the un-herded Herdmans, whose mother works double-shifts and has essentially given-up, is a rumored abundance of food at the church. Much to the chagrin of the kids who previously enjoyed a Herdman-Free-Zone at their Sunday School classes, the hungry Herdmans decide their omnipresence is called for, even here in the church where the oldest Herdman, Imogene, mutters unhappily that apparently “everything” is about Jesus. You can imagine how it all plays out: near disaster, followed by unforgettable redemption. That’s my kind of Christmas story. You can download it to your Kindle or listen to it on Audible or even watch the movie on YouTube featuring Loretta “Hotlips Houlihan” Swit of M.A.S.H. fame. You’re welcome.

And finally, for who those of you who agree with me that this is the best Christmas play ending ever (even if it is animated, Charlie Brown and Snoopy will always be real people to me), heeeeeeeeere’s Linus!

About Finishing

Posted on by
new years eve celebration
[Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels.com]

I am a finisher. Oh, not necessarily of marathons or anything like that. No, I am more the kind of person who gets a weird satisfaction out of finishing the last cracker in the box or making someone eat the last pickle in the jar. Then I can recycle the box or wash up the jar and feel strangely that I completed something and all the detritus has gone to its rightful place: the recycle bin, the storage room, someone’s intestines.

I have to admit that I’m a little (okay, a lot) like this when it comes to the end of the year. On December 1, I look longingly toward my new planner (that I ordered in September) and get “excited” about penciling in all the birthdays and paydays and Canadian holidays that my American planner doesn’t have the good sense to include. Making the first mark in it is difficult for me, however. I subscribe to Anne Shirley’s philosophy: “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

It is nice to think that, but it is also a little naive. Turning the page to January 1, 2021 is not a magic spell, except in my brain, which is a real place and I can’t wholly discount the power of the mind to create something tangible. And 2020 has been – shall we say – a little surreal. To quote Barbara Poelle in the latest issue of Writer’s Digest: “This year there was a global pandemic, a sonic boom of needed steps in social and racial justice…an election cycle that is rocking the foundation of (their) nation…and murder hornets.”

And so I find myself once again in The In Between. I don’t think it’s any mistake that we celebrate Christmas at the end of the year – there’s all sorts of circumstantial evidence that Jesus was born around this time – but also Christmas makes us sloooowwww down, before we start mistaking up a whole new year. Oh, sure, it may feel like your days are whizzing by with the extra chores of shopping and baking and wrapping and decorating – or whatever extras you assign to December. These things keep me grounded firmly in the present, away from wishing away the time and also, away from that spanky new planner.

Last weekend, Rick and I put up our Christmas tree. We enjoyed it unadorned except for lights for an evening and then, on Sunday, as we pulled out the boxes of decorations, I groaned and wished that the Christmas Tree Decorating Fairy would show up and do this for me. But I knew that She/He didn’t really exist and I might as well “get it over with”. Because I do like me a decorated tree to look at every day of December. And Fairies, though prodigious in their powers, probably do not know how exactly I like the ribbon to go around my tree and which decorations need to be relegated to the backside because I love them less than others that deserve front-and-center prominence.

And it was a lovely afternoon: just me and my husband and Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey engaging in a tradition that is timeless and ever-new. And it was nice to get it done before December 1 – a little less rushed than if we squeezed it into a weeknight in the middle of the month and a little more special because we did it together.

As much as I like to Finish Things, there’s a lot to be said for Holding Off, Slowing Down & Pausing. After all, it’s not really good sense to eat twenty Oreos just so I can recycle the box. It’s also not good sense to waste all my December days wishing for January 1. The shopping, the baking, the wrapping, the decorating are ALL GOOD THINGS. I will try to savor my Oreos one at a time and give thanks for all the days that I get to have.

About the Mail

Posted on by

So, do you have your Christmas cards ready to get mailed out? Are you looking forward to an avalanche of cards and packages (that you didn’t order from Amazon) to pour forth from your Superbox when you insert that magical key to reveal the wondrous contents inside?

Yeah, no. Mail really has changed in the last twenty or thirty years. It’s rare to open up my mailbox and see handwritten addresses in the to and from spaces. Occasionally there’s a birthday card or a thank you. But mostly the mail is a never-ending invitation to recycle a bunch of paper that I never asked for. Even bills don’t come in the mail anymore unless they’re from my offline plumber or some magazine that I never subscribed to telling me to “Pay Now!”

When I was a kid I so loved the idea of getting mail that I was okay even with getting junk mail sent to me, thrilled because it was addressed to me. In a magazine I discovered the answer to my quest to be noticed by Canada Post: a sign-up form with circles to fill in if you wanted to be “contacted” by multiple retailers. Little did they know that I was twelve years old and had no money or no idea what an onslaught of mail I was setting my parents’ mailbox up for. Not unlike my inbox when someone sells my email address without my permission.

It was mostly junk, yes, but I think I must have received occasional free samples of brand new products like cereal that I didn’t like or dishwasher soap for an appliance we didn’t own. I even became a Regal Catalog representative and pored over their magazines like they were Christmas catalogs, blissfully unaware that most of their stuff fell apart moments after you purchased it or was “not exactly as advertised”.

I did, however, also receive actual letters back then, because I also collected pen pals along with those free samples and catalogs. The Edmonton Journal had a kids page where you could get your name and address published if you were interested in writing to someone across the province or across the world. I had several “first-date” letters that never went anywhere – kind of like the swipe left of my time. But I also had a lasting correspondence with two girls, one from Winterburn, Alberta and the other from Belfast, Ireland. One taught everything about the horses she was so in love with, the other about punk rock and what it was like to have bombs blow out the windows in your living room.

Although I bemoan the fact that I don’t get any letters anymore, I’m not exactly writing them either – it’s just too easy to slough off the job of hand-writing anything to anyone anymore. Gone are the days of having to decipher someone’s handwriting, of pressed flowers or photographs falling out from between the leaves of paper, of saving such things in shoeboxes for all eternity. Because they are saveable: they’re usually thin, unique and can contain valuable information.

And so sometimes I will even print up a memorable email and paste it into a journal or fold it up like a letter and second it in a shoebox. And you can bet that I save any Christmas letter or card that I receive, for at least a little while, and if it has a handwritten note all the better. These things might take time, but then those messages can last for a lifetime.

Here’s wishing that your mailboxes will all be full of only good stuff this COVID Christmas.